The holiday season provides opportunities to spend time with friends and family. The pandemic taught us to cherish these special opportunities to be together. Be it a gift exchange, holiday parties or other gatherings, there are countless ways for us to be with those who mean the most in our lives.
The times we gather are enhanced through meals and the memories we create around them. Mom’s cookies, dad’s appetizers and grandma’s famous meatballs all offer opportunities for shared experiences. Cooking together as a family gives us a chance to not only find ways to work together, but also learn about our heritage and pass along some great recipes.
With this in mind, memory-and-recipe-sharing experts, Daniel Zawisza and Chris Kozak, co-founders of the recipe sharing app Dishtory, offer these great ideas on how to make meals a memory this holiday season. If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that we can lose memory-making opportunities way too easily.
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Make the meal, don’t buy it. We know that time spent in the kitchen cooking and baking can be stressful. There’s meal planning, preparation, timing and coordination that can be stressful. However, the holidays are more magical when the meal is home cooked. The activity creates a bonding opportunity across a family’s generations. This is the perfect time to capture memories, share stories and traditions about family heritage, and pass along this knowledge to the younger generations.
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Find a Role for Everyone. Cooking and baking shouldn’t be a one-person show. Getting family members involved makes for a more enjoyable experience. There is plenty to do, it’s not just all cooking. Potatoes and carrots can be peeled and sliced, appetizers can be prepped, drinks can be poured, and pots and pans can be cleaned, all while still preparing the meal. This activity keeps everyone together and without a doubt, will create memorable stories.
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Capture not only the memories, but the recipes. Don’t let that moment pass. Using pictures and videos to capture fun times will preserve these memories. Bringing generations together creates a unique learning and bonding opportunity. When you prepare a meal that’s full of history, hard work and a joyful experience, it is undoubtedly a memory that must be kept. Holidays also offer the chance to create new memories over new meals. How many times have you meant to get a recipe from a relative, but eventually forgot before so much time passed that you regret not doing something sooner? Get those recipes in real time, record them, and upload them so you have them forever.
Dishtory is a unique way families can share recipes and the memories behind them, making you smile and filling your stomach with love as you hear the voice of your friends and family share that recipe.
The app allows users to record (either audio or video) or upload pictures of their favorite and most popular recipes and share them with loved ones. Its uniqueness is the audio and video options that allow users to capture not only the recipes, but the nuances that turn them into memories. Recipes can be shared either privately with your group of friends, or searchable for the general public on Dishtory.
As a reminder of how special this time of year is, Daniel and Chris have uploaded the sugar cookie recipe from Daniel’s mother for public use on Dishtory. This recipe — and the voicemail message that Mom Zawisza left for Daniel — was the genesis for Dishtory.
